In this article, I make a methodological intervention into Black music studies by arguing for greater consideration of “metapragmatic indexicality,” as theorized by linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein (1976, 1993, 2003), in examining Black musical identity formation. More specifically, I wish to address how metapragmatic indexicals from Black musical history “calibrate” the pragmatic level of musical signs and pull them into a configuration that ultimately signals Blackness to listeners at a metalevel. With particular attention to what Silverstein calls “reflexive calibration,” this work reveals how Black musicians deploy their music-historical knowledge to signal Blackness at and beyond a pragmatic level of semiosis. This work extends foundational studies of interactivity and sociality in improvised musics, particularly jazz, by Ingrid Monson (1996) and R. Keith Sawyer (1996) but with a more robust focus on Blackness as a historically and culturally situated identity category. To elucidate this framework, I examine the career and music-making of Chicago-born trumpeter Marquis Hill (b. 1987), whose genre-crossing musical aesthetic and theorizations of Black musical history offer an ideal corpus for analysis. I offer close musical-semiotic analysis of two of Hill’s recorded tracks: “Medley: The Way We Play / Minority,” a combination of spoken word and a cover of a jazz standard (saxophonist / composer Gigi Gryce’s “Minority”) from his 2016 album The Way We Play, and “Ego vs. Spirit,” an original composition from his 2018 album Modern Flows Vol. 2. Through transcription and analysis of these performances, and remaining attentive to Hill’s compositional, business (via his record label), arranging, and improvisational actions as well as the lyrical content, I demonstrate the utility and applicability of metapragmatics in identity formation across a range of musical materials.
The countertenor has featured prominently in new opera ever since its reemergence in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite its prevalence, the sound of a countertenor—for audience members and composers alike—remains marked not only as a novel timbre but also as a sign of hybridity, as an “ethereal, angelic-demonic” voice (Aucoin). As Anthony Roth Costanzo put it, there is “something about the countertenor voice which is both very primal and old…but also very otherworldly and unusual.” Building on previous scholarship (Knaus, Linke) on typical countertenor character types in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I reveal how contemporary opera composers have engaged with this voice. I explore the countertenor’s queer associations, particularly in conjunction with details of neo-Baroque style. No other voice type prompts such consistent assumptions regarding sexuality and such complexities regarding the categorization and performance of gender. Brett’s analysis of Britten’s use of the high male voice in representations of the exotic and sexually deviant applies equally well to recent operas. From analysis of numerous operas and interviews with countertenors and composers, I have found that the countertenor repeatedly inspires archaic and exotic elements of musical style. This voice seems to exert a gravitational pull, drawing contemporary opera composers toward the past and the culturally distant in ways that often contrast with their stylistic norms. In contemporary opera, countertenors are consistently cast as homme fatale characters, embodying queer eroticism and gendered complexity, or as supernatural beings transporting listeners to another realm.
Jean-Joseph Mouret’s contribution to the French cantata in the early eighteenth century has usually been viewed as slight in comparison to that of his contemporaries, such as Nicolas Bernier and André Campra. Because Mouret published only one collection of four cantatas in 1729 and the cantata Didon as a single work without a date, his contribution to the offshoot called the cantatille in the 1730s has been viewed as more significant. However, this evaluation not only fails to consider the cantatas he composed for the Comédie-Italienne but neglects to acknowledge the significance of Didon, which is arguably one of his early works. Although Didon was not Mouret’s first publication, it probably came soon after he had secured a royal privilège in 1718 to engrave his music. Mouret’s choice of subject for Didon was inspired by a painting by François de Troy entitled Le festin de Didon & Énée, which was commissioned by Mouret’s patroness, the Duchesse du Maine, for her residence at Sceaux. During final production of the cantata, the involvement of the duchess in the Cellamare Affair caused her to be arrested and exiled from her home, and this situation may have contributed to a delay in the publication and performance of the cantata. Nevertheless, Didon was published and sold throughout Mouret’s career and thereafter by his widow, but at some later point it disappeared from view. In modern times it has often been considered a lost work. When two copies of the engraved score were rediscovered and acquired by the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (in 1979 and 1991 respectively), the status of this work changed. The latter copy is especially significant, because it includes revisions (collettes) pasted over the original bass line. This article presents detailed analysis of the composer’s hand and evidence showing that these revisions were added by Mouret himself. It also explores the complex history of Didon, including its relationship to the Troy painting and the political and personal obstacles to its publication. These circumstances also contributed to the cantata’s obscurity: only one performance is known to have taken place during Mouret’s lifetime in 1729, but the cantata can now be returned to its rightful place within his oeuvre as an engaging work that depicts Dido’s tragic fate.
Most of Henry Cowell’s political inclinations lay relatively dormant until 1929, a year that saw the confluence of several crucial events. In May he returned from an extraordinary visit to the Soviet Union, in October the New York stock market crashed, and in January 1930 Cowell became a regular faculty member at the New School for Social Research, an unorthodox progressive educational institution in New York City known as a hotbed for left-wing intellectuals and artists. The same period saw the emergence of new cultural organizations from the Communist Party of the United States, in which Cowell actively participated. This article explores Cowell’s engagement with the American left through an analysis of his writings and activities beginning in 1929, following his return from Russia. He embraced communist ideals as a means of improving conditions for American composers, whom he regarded as an underclass, while advancing a vision of modernism accessible to the masses. Cowell’s imprisonment in 1936 and his release four years later coincided with a changing political climate that forced him to recalibrate his political past. Drawing on newly discovered and previously neglected sources, this study examines Cowell’s ideological political commitments during a period in which leftist intellectuals and artists sought to emancipate themselves from the oppressive nature of capitalism and later the fear of anticommunism. By situating Cowell’s communist past within its American context, it offers a nuanced understanding of his political ideas, their impact on musical modernism, and the ways in which changing national circumstances compelled him to distance himself from earlier affiliations.
Robert Schumann’s music represents a key source of non-original materials for an extended series of works that the Argentine composer Gerardo Gandini developed from the 1980s until the end of his creative career. Rsch: Escenas for piano and orchestra (1983–84), the first work in the series, reinterprets Schumann’s concept of cycle, emphasizing its fragmentary and self-reflexive nature. The work comprises fourteen brief numbers, twelve of which are derived from Schumann’s pieces. Concealed by their shared title (“Florestán,” in reference to one of Schumann’s alter egos), nos. 5 and 13 are based instead on paraphrased fragments drawn from Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. Gandini’s rereading of these pieces, which he regarded as athematic, is characterized by a gestural conception of musical materials. By associating Schumann’s cycles with Schoenberg’s opus 11 in this way, Gandini extends his idea of the aesthetic availability of traditional materials into the twentieth century. Additional procedural allusions to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître enable Gandini to reaffirm his commitment to the modernist tradition while simultaneously maintaining an ironic distance from it. Drawing on concepts from Gérard Genette’s literary theory, the article argues that each element of this intertextual framework fulfills a specific function aimed at shaping an allusive tradition that extends, as “music about music,” to Gandini’s work itself. By incorporating his own work into a genealogy encompassing both nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, Gandini at the same time attained a distinctive position within Argentine music of his time.
